Charles Chaplin, CITY LIGHTS (1931) 87 Minutes
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August 28, 2007 (XV:1) Charles Chaplin, CITY LIGHTS (1931) 87 minutes Virginia Cherrill... A Blind Girl Florence Lee... The Blind Girl's Grandmother Harry Myers... An Eccentric Millionaire Al Ernest Garcia... The Eccentric Millionaire's Butler (as Allan Garcia) Hank Mann... A Prizefighter Charlie Chaplin... A Tramp Jean Harlow... Extra in restaurant scene Produced and Directed by Charles Chaplin Written by Charles Chaplin, Harry Clive, Harry Crocker Original Music by Charles Chaplin Cinematography by Gordon Pollock and Roland Totheroh Edited Charles Chaplin and Willard Nico Selected for the National Film Registry by the National Film Preservation Board, 1991 CHARLES CHAPLIN (16 April 1889, Walworth, London, England—25 December 1977, Vevey, Switzerland) acted in 87 films, beginning with Making a Living 1914, and ending with A Countess from Hong Kong 1967. He directed 75 of those films, beginning with Twenty Minutes of Love 1914, and he also produced most and edited many of them. He also wrote the music for the sound films. He won a Best Music Oscar in 1973 for Limelight, which had been released in 1952 but didn’t open in Los Angeles until 1972, hence ineligible under Academy rules for 20 years. He was given an Honorary Oscar for his entire career in 1972 and an earlier one for The Circus in 1929. He had been nominated for best actor that year, but the Academy gave him the Special Award “for versatility and genius in writing, directing and producing The Circus.” He received best actor, best picture and best original screenplay nominations for The Great Dictator 1940 and a best original screenplay nomination for Monsieur Verdoux 1947. Some of his other films are A King in New York 1957, Limelight 1952, The Great Dictator 1940 (as Adenoid Hynkel, Dictator of Tomania andA Jewish Barber), Modern Times 1936, Camille 1926, The Gold Rush 1925, Nice and Friendly 1922, The Kid 1921, A Dog's Life 1918 The Immigrant 1917, The Cure 1917, Easy Street 1917, The Floorwalker 1916, The Champion 1915, Tillie's Punctured Romance 1914, The Face on the Bar Room Floor 1914, Mabel's Married Life 1914, Mabel's Busy Day 1914. VIRGINIA CHERRILL (12 April 1908, Carthage, Illinois—14 November 1996, Santa Barbara, California) appeared in 14 films. The first was City Lights, the last, Trouble Waters 1936. FLORENCE LEE (12 March 1888, Vermont—1 September 1962, Hollywood) acted in 99 films, the last of whihch was City Lights. The first was Teaching Her Dad to Like Her 1911.HARRY MEYERS (5 September 1882, New Haven—25 December 1938, Hollywood, pneumonia) appeared in 245 films. The first was The Guerilla (1908) Toward the end he was often uncredited. Until nearly the middle, his character never got a name. When he did get a name it was Arthur Weatherbee, Lt. Du Fresne, Listen Lester, Henri de Latour, Count Zappata, Amos P. Stitch, Drunk, Nervous Patient, Berwiskey, and, in Zenobia, his last film, released the year after his death, Party Guest Who Didn’t Mind. from World Film Directors. Vol. I. Edited by John Wakeman. his fragile soubrette wife, Hannah. Before Chaplin was three, his The H.W. Wilson Co., NY 1987. Entry by Gerald Mast. father deserted the family for another woman, leaving Hannah to sink into the insanity that marked the rest of her life. The young CHAPLIN, Sir CHARLES (SPENCER) (April 16, 1889-December Chaplin and his older half-brother, Sydney, lived for a while with 25, 1977), Anglo-American clown, star, director, producer, writer, Chaplin senior and his mistress, and in 1898 Chaplin was briefly and composer, was born and raised in the working-class London reunited with his mother, whom he adored. However, he spent his districts of Walworth, Lambeth, and Kennington. His parents, both childhood mostly in public charity homes and on the streets, where music-hall entertainers, had fallen on hard times. Chaplin’s baritone he quickly learned the power of money and propriety, while father, also named Charles, had taken to the bottle and to beating Charlie Chaplin—City Lights—2 carefully observing the little jobs and stratagems that allowed the around the park, propelled by three states of inebriation: drunk, least fortunate members of society to survive. drunker, and drunkest. It was a period when, as Chaplin later According to Chaplin. He made his music hall debut at the observed, you made a movie by taking Mabel Normand, a bucket of age of five, taking his mother’s place on stage one evening when whitewash, and a camera to a park and improvising. Chaplin began she lost her voice. His career began in earnest in the summer of to direct his films. Among the most interesting, pointing toward 1898. Though he was not from Lancashire, he became one of the later work, was The New Janitor. Charlie, the lowly janitor of an Eight Lancashire Lads, a children’s music troupe that toured office building, saves a pretty secretary from attack by a thief. In a England’s provincial music halls. The featured role of Billy in deliberate irony, the thief turns out to be a “respectable” employee Sherlock Holmes, first with H.A. Saintsbury in a 1903 tour of the of the firm, the handsome gent to whom the secretary was provinces, then with its original American author and star, William previously attracted. By protecting her from this apparent pillar of Gillette, brought Chaplin to London’s West End. In 1907 he joined rectitude, Chaplin demonstrates that he is the worthier man and that Fred Karno’s Pantomime Troupe, England’s most accomplished society’s conceptions of worth based on good looks and social company of physical farceurs (whose alumni also included Stan graces are themselves askew. In many later films Chaplin’s Tramp Laurel). By 1908 Chaplin had risen to be Karno’s star attraction, would demonstrate his moral worth by protecting a fragile, specializing in his dexterous portrayal of a comic drunk—a routine idealized woman against foes bigger, stronger, richer than himself. he would recreate in films over the next forty years. Between 1909 By the end of his Keystone year, Chaplin had become so and 1913 Chaplin accompanied the Karno troupe on tours to Paris popular in America’s nickelodeons that merely displaying the and the United States. On his second tour he received an offer to Tramp’s wooden effigy with the words “I’m here today” would join Mack Sennett’s Keystone Company in Hollywood. Mabel attract long lines of loyal fans. Sennett offered Chaplin five times Normand, Sennett’s leading comedienne, Adam Kessel, co-owner his 1914 salary, $750 per week, for another year at Keystone, but of the Keystone Company, and Sennett himself all take credit for the Essanay Company of Chicago offered Chaplin $1250 per week, discovering Chaplin in the Karno act. plus a $10,000 bonus upon signing. Chaplin left Hollywood for Chaplin arrived on the Sennett lot in December 1913 with Chicago. After two films he transferred to the Essanay lot in a contract for a year’s work at $150 per week. He had been making California, where he could escape both the winter chill and a hostile only $50 weekly as a star of the music hall stage. His first reaction management. to the movie business was a combination of shock and dismay. Chaplin’s year at Essanay was a transitional period Accustomed to the temporal continuity of stage comedy, Chaplin between the knockabout Sennett farces and the more subtle couldn’t understand how a scene or routine could be cut into non- comedies of psychological observation and moral debate that mark chronological pieces. Compared with the careful comic the mature Chaplin....His sixth film at Essanay, The Tramp...was the craftsmanship of the Karno crew, he found Sennett’s method first film in which Chaplin was fully conscious of both his Tramp careless, sloppy, and crude. Working frantically to produce at least persona and the relationship of that persona to the respectable social two comic reels a week, Sennett never invested time in deepening world. As in The New Janitor, Chaplin’s Tramp protects a frail the texture or complicating the structure of gags. The Sennett style woman from physical harm—this time from fellow tramps, showed less interest in comic observations of human behavior than members of his own “class.” (The actress, Edna Purviance, joined in run, bash, smash, and crash. “Chaplin was used to a slower, Chaplin’s troupe early in his Essanay year. She was to play the subtler, and more individual pantomime,” according to Theodore idealized woman in every Chaplin film for the next eight years, and Huff, his first major biographer. Chaplin’s first Keystone comedy, she remained on the Chaplin payroll until her death in 1958.).... Making a Living (1914), dressed him in a stereotypic English music This ending—the Tramp’s disappointment and return to hall outfit, then kept him racing across the frame for an entire reel. the road—would dominate Chaplin films fore two decades, a But his second Keystone film, Kid Auto Races at Venice, was the recognition that the Tramp’s life was the road, that singularity comic revelation in which Chaplin assembled his trademark Tramp meant solitude....In his Essanay films Chaplin defined the central costume for the first time—bowler hat, reedy cane, baggy pants conflict for the Tramp as between the world of the “straight” and (borrowed from Fatty Arbuckle), floppy shoes (borrowed from Ford his own personal system of morality and value. The Tramp could Sterling). resist (and implicitly criticize) the “straight” obsession with Like many Keystone films, Kid Auto Races was property because his needs were more elemental—survival, shelter, improvised around an actual event—the racing of homemade cars food, and love.